WINTER SOLDIER Returns in New 2014 Series

The Winter Soldier is returning to a solo series, just in time for the movie that bears his name, Captain America: The Winter Soldier. While the movie is hitting in April 2014, Winter Soldier: The Bitter March will hit comic book shelves in February 2014, an all-new mini-series written by current Captain America writer Rick Remender and drawn by artist Roland Boschi.

The story takes place in 1966, telling the tale of one of the Winter Soldier’s missions while Captain America was ostensibly still in deep freeze. That doesn’t mean the series won’t affect Captain America, though, as Remender tells USAToday it waill “shatter” Steve Rogers’ world.

In The Bitter March, Nazi scientists rear their ugly head once more with a formula that falls into the hands of Hydra. S.H.I.E.L.D. agents Nick Fury and Ran Shen have to race against Soviet agent Winter Soldier to secure the formula and secure a major Cold War victory.

The Winter Soldier, for the uninitiated, is Bucky Barnes, Captain America’s World War II sidekick. After an injury in the same crash that appeared to take Cap’s life, Barnes was captured by the Russians, brainwashed, and given a cybernetic arm. He then sat in cold storage, woken every few years for a top-secret mission for his new masters, until being discovered in modern times by Captain America, who saved him from himself and restored his memories.

Here, though, he is most definitely the enemy, and Remender says he’ll be “a force of nature, and when he is tracking you, you are in a bad way.” The character stars as sort of a protagonist-antagonist, with editor Tom Brevoort saying “I’m not sure that you always know quite who to root for,” because while he’s against the “good” forces of the US and S.H.I.E.L.D., he is also just so unstoppable.

“He was a tool who had very little control of his own mind,” Remender said, “but I will be exploring how Bucky Barnes is underneath all of it still. Even back then, there was a piece of him trying to stand back up.”

The mini-series will tie directly to Remender’s Captain America, with both Winter Soldier and Ran Shen appearing in November’s Captain America #13. Shen is the villain there, further complicating their portrayal in the past.

Stay tuned for more from Newsarama on Winter Soldier: The Bitter March on Wednesday, October 30, 2013.